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I've been a customer for some time and when I export I get the entire calendar which is way more than I need. I will be needing to export more frequently but don't want to get the full range of dates for the past few years every time.

Is this doable, or a future feature?

Trumba has done such a great job of adding features, this would be a very fine feature to add!

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Welcome to the forums and thanks for your kind words about Trumba. : ) This is a good question. We should have this documented, so I'll work on that! In the meantime, you can do this by creating a custom URL for your .ics feed that specifies the date range. To create the URL, you use the address of the .ics feed of your hosted calendar, which is http://www.trumba.com/calendars/yourcalendarname.ics, and append a query string that includes parameters that define what you want. Even if you're not sure what I mean by "query string," when you see the example URL, you'll recognize it as something you see in URLs all the time.

For example, to export the month of April, I entered this URL in the browser's address bar:

Trumba will ask you if you want to open the file or download the info as an .ics file. Downloading it is the same as exporting from your Trumba account. If you use Safari, it downloads the file and also opens iCal and imports the calendar.

Everything from the question mark to the end is the query string. You could also use parameters to specify the number of months or weeks instead of the end date. The list of supported parameters you can use are in Customize calendar RSS feeds (the parameters work for all feeds, not just RSS). However, this topic is slightly outdated, because now we're using startdate instead of date, and there's now the enddate parameter that you'll most likely use in your URL. Some more new parameters are coming, and I should have more info about them in a few weeks.

Hope that helps! I'm sorry this info wasn't available where it should be and you had to ask. But I bet you've helped a bunch of people who will see this (and hopefully a bunch more who will see the updated Help!).

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If I want to export the data into comma delimeted, will this function also work? I want to be able to query the data.

Thanks for the prompt and complete repsonse, I jst need one step further.

Trudy

Hi Trudy,

Welcome to the forums and thanks for your kind words about Trumba. : ) This is a good question. We should have this documented, so I'll work on that! In the meantime, you can do this by creating a custom URL for your .ics feed that specifies the date range. To create the URL, you use the address of the .ics feed of your hosted calendar, which is http://www.trumba.com/calendars/yourcalendarname.ics, and append a query string that includes parameters that define what you want. Even if you're not sure what I mean by "query string," when you see the example URL, you'll recognize it as something you see in URLs all the time.

For example, to export the month of April, I entered this URL in the browser's address bar:

Trumba will ask you if you want to open the file or download the info as an .ics file. Downloading it is the same as exporting from your Trumba account. If you use Safari, it downloads the file and also opens iCal and imports the calendar.

Everything from the question mark to the end is the query string. You could also use parameters to specify the number of months or weeks instead of the end date. The list of supported parameters you can use are in Customize calendar RSS feeds (the parameters work for all feeds, not just RSS). However, this topic is slightly outdated, because now we're using startdate instead of date, and there's now the enddate parameter that you'll most likely use in your URL. Some more new parameters are coming, and I should have more info about them in a few weeks.

Hope that helps! I'm sorry this info wasn't available where it should be and you had to ask. But I bet you've helped a bunch of people who will see this (and hopefully a bunch more who will see the updated Help!).

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Hmm, I see what you're saying. This particular method won't work to create a CSV file, and I will have to do some checking around tomorrow for a more efficient option, but I have something that would work, albeit a little convoluted.

After you download the ICS file the way I explained before, you can import it either back into Trumba or into another calendar program, and then export it out again (using the normal export calendar steps) as a comma-separated file. Like I said, a little bit of turning around in circles, but it'll work. I'll ask for some alternatives, though, and let you know tomorrow afternoon what I find out.

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I unfortunately didn't get a better alternative from my last person. I'm sorry. However, he did agree that it was clumsy and promised to put it on his list for improvement. It might be a little while before it happens, but I feel as you do about it getting figured out one way or the other. I appreciate your confidence! : )

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I am back. I tried doing the date export and it just wouldn't work. It couldn't find the calendar and I got an error message.

It would be so nice to be able to select the fields and date range to export. I know that there has just got to be a way to get this done. Would you do some more checking for me?

Thanks.

Hi Trudy,

I unfortunately didn't get a better alternative from my last person. I'm sorry. However, he did agree that it was clumsy and promised to put it on his list for improvement. It might be a little while before it happens, but I feel as you do about it getting figured out one way or the other. I appreciate your confidence! : )

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I'm afraid I might not have the answer you're looking for, I'm sorry! Right now it's still the case that the only way to get specifically the info you want to request it through the calendar's ICS or RSS feed. If you export to .csv, are you using Excel on the other end to work with the data? If so, an idea I got from a colleague was to sort by start date and delete the rows you don't need...same with the columns representing fields you don't need. I know it's not the most elegant thing, but it's an option and is maybe something you've been doing already anyway.

On that note, how are you querying the data? Our developers just recently released support for extracting custom fields through the .ics feed as well. We have been working with media clients who want to do "reverse publishing," for which they use these URL parameters to create the kind of calendar feed they want, and they write their own programs to put the information into the format they want on the other end. In the newspaper world, this means some kind of print system, but if you're so inclined, the choices are many for re-purposing the data. This might be way more than you're looking for, but I just thought I'd mention it and let you know about a white paper on our site that talks more in detail about how one of our customers did this: Reverse publishing online event information white paper.

When you got the calendar not found error, were you trying to get the data from an unpublished calendar? I'm sorry I didn't think to ask whether your calendar was published and instead assumed that it was. So I gave you the URL that will work only for published calendars. If you want to get feeds from unpublished calendars, use this URL instead:

http://www.trumba.com/service/yourcalendarname.ics (or .rss).

In addition, because the calendar is unpublished, the feed can be returned to you only when you're signed in to your Trumba account on the computer on which you're requesting the feed.

Incidentally, you can view/download your calendar through a CSV feed as well, but it looks like the CSV format isn't supporting the query-string parameters. Our developer has gone for the day, but I'll catch up with him about this tomorrow just to confirm with him and will post if he tells me otherwise.

I really would like to hear more about how you're querying the data if you have a chance to post about it. Thanks, Trudy. I'm sorry I don't have better news to pass on.